Shiloh Critical Essays

Analysis

Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories moved a scholar with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov and a study on women sleuths in literature into the forefront of American short-story writers. Shortly after its appearance in 1982, Shiloh and Other Stories won for Mason the PEN Hemingway Award for First Fiction and became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN Faulkner Award. In addition to receiving critical acclaim, the collection enjoyed popular success, and various works from it have appeared in anthologies as examples of well-crafted short stories.

The strength of this thematically interlaced collection stems from the stories’ universality and Mason’s ability to create characters who easily could live next door. Mason’s fictional Hopewell is the quintessential rural American community. Its people and its problems are those experienced daily by thousands of real small-town citizens. The characters who populate this little corner of the world are nothing more than common folk, but their lives reflect the pathos found in traditional literary tragedies.

The stories’ brevity and self-containment demonstrate Edgar Allan Poe’s pronouncement on the characteristics of a good short story. Although thematically intertwined, these stories operate as individual vignettes or slices of life, demonstrating Mason’s ability to make form fit function. The Shiloh...